This application claims priority to Provisional Application Number 60/240,521 filed Oct. 12, 2000, hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes. In addition, this application is being concurrently filed with U.S. Ser. No. 09/797,318 commonly assigned and hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes.
The World Wide Web is an integrated network of sites, each is specialized in a different subject or theme. Despite the differences, most sites can be categorized into groups based upon their content. Some sites specialize in news, some in sports, others in book e-tailing and still others in investment.
Navigation between the various sites is limited to clicking on hyperlinks. Hyperlinks in one site point to pages on another thus allowing the browser to move among the sites. This method of navigation is powerful yet it also limits the user's browsing experience. One online bookseller will not point to another since it does not want to move potential buyers off its site. The offered hyperlinks will be limited only to websites that the site has relations with. The user that browses for a book, however, does want to be able to compare prices on multiple competitive online bookstores.
Hypertext pages viewed over the World Wide Web are free-form text documents. They are not self descriptive in the way that they do not contain the meaning of the displayed text. It is up to the reader of the site to interpret the text into meaningful information. This all works well for a human reader. However, a machine reading this text (data) is lacking the necessary descriptors (meta-data) to understand what is being displayed.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a method of analyzing the unstructured data of hypertext pages, understanding the meta-data behind it and embedding this meta-data into the original hypertext page at the client's machine. The meta-data may be stored, hidden from the user's view, so that it is unobtrusive. However, applications that know where to look for this meta-data can easily access and utilize it.